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in April of this year, when it became apparent that John Kerry could be the president of the United States, we got together where there were six or seven of us with over 100 people listening on the telephone. The total political experience of everybody there consisted of one person, Bill Franke, who over 30 years ago managed the first of John Danforth�s campaigns. I had debated Kerry in 1971 and spoke at the 1972 Republican Convention, and I had no involvement in politics in over 30 years � and that was it. That was not a very impressive political resume. We had absolutely no one who knew anything about the mass media. Instead we had Bill Lanham, a farmer and sports goods store owner from Grinnell, Iowa; Ray Sims, a retired banker from Missouri-Montana; Barry Thoreau, who is the greatest hero of our unit, a teacher and an oilfield worker from Kansas; and Admiral Roy Hoffman, the man who actually organized this, a 78-year-old sailor whose ship was first sunk in the Korean War, where he almost died in the Sea of Japan, and who was with us and led us in Vietnam over and over. Every single person there had been seriously wounded in Vietnam, except for me. I was the only one who wasn�t ..